The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $15.7 million contract to UT Southwestern Medical Center and Northrop Grumman Corp. to develop an open-access national online database and analysis resource center that will help scientists study and combat viruses such as those that cause hepatitis, encephalitis, smallpox, acute respiratory distress and dengue fever, as well as newly emerging pathogenic viruses. ...
Previous work at UT Southwestern headed by Dr. Richard Scheuermann, professor of pathology, clinical sciences and in the Cancer Immunobiology Center, led to the development of an open-access database sponsored by the NIH for influenza, including the pandemic H1N1 virus, commonly referred to as swine flu. ...
The database supported by the new contract will be developed using the influenza model at UT Southwestern. The new Virus Pathogen Database and Analysis Resource (ViPR) will enable researchers to develop an online bioinformatics center that will contain data and analysis tools for a wide range of viral pathogens. The viruses that will be part of the database include Herpesviridae, the causative agents of herpes and chicken pox; the Flaviviridae family, which includes the hepatitis C and West Nile viruses; and Poxviridae, which causes smallpox.
“The ViPR resource will support gene sequence data, information about the immune response to viral infection, and information about the protein structure of viruses,” said Dr. Scheuermann, principal investigator on the local portion of the new contract. “This database will bring all that information together in one place.” ...
The ViPR database is scheduled to be available in December at www.viprbrc.org. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/14/2009 07:03:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
